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The problem isn't the loans in a practical sense. The real problem is companies driving degree inflation. Example: early Internet days, how many ISP technical personnel had 4 year degrees? I'm talking about the guys maintaining the lines / switches / routers. Not very many at all. The guys in charge often did, but even that wasn't guaranteed. I, personally and through company programs, trained many High School kids on the intricacies of R&S. Try getting in today without at least a 2 year degree. A 4 year degree will be preferred, if not required. Heck, even help desk which is entry level, often requires a 2 year.

Companies drove us here because a 4 year degree student is "better" even if it doesn't really matter.

I agree that eliminating the student loan program will help. However, there need to be a lot more changes then that.

The trouble is that it's chicken and egg. You cannot get rid of the loans until companies stop demanding 4 year degrees for jobs that do not really require them, and vice versa. The current situation is not tenable, heck even the technical degree system is getting overdone. We need a return to the apprentice system (adding technical fields), while parents need to allow hardcore discipline of their little snowflakes in school. Half the problem is that colleges have had to take over education that should have been done in high school, otherwise known as year 1 (of 5).

Considering the HD-DVD vs Blu-ray thing was a patent war, and nothing more, this might be true. Instead of one company (in this case Toshiba) you have the BDA (a consortium of many companies) dictating the terms. DVD Forum or not, Toshiba owned it, and made a classic mistake with HD-DVD. They tried to protect their DVD patents and it cost them CE manufacturers that were being offered pieces of the Blu-ray spec. So, in the end, it was a pretty much Toshiba alone vs the combined might of nearly everyone else.

There are idiots in every age group. I was stuck listening (until the RL muted them) a couple of college guys playing so tough. I don't care if your gf is blowing you while you play WoW, it's not my concern.

Or the ever so impressive 15/16 year olds trying to act older and smarter than they really are (including the idiot hunter that manages to feign right by the f*cking healers every time)

Corporations can pay taxes too. All I can say is "hello transactional tax" and hopefully (but not likely) goodbye to many other taxes. You can't dodge a transactional tax unless you cease doing business in a country. Considering this would ruin most companies, not having transactions in the US, it would remove any incentive to move headquarters overseas. In actuality every country is slowly going to move towards a transactional tax anyway to stop the, shall we say less than positive intimations (read: Blackmail), companies try to pull now. The funny thing is while the US has a higher tax rate, it has a lower collected rate than most countries.

The plus here is that corporations are the ones that are going to f*ck themselves over. You see they need, and I mean NEED, the government. Yes, the same ebil gubbermint they complain about. China isn't exactly a haven for Intellectual Property (i.e. rampant theft), other countries can't project power to defend the corporations various holdings, other countries lack the legal mechanisms for corporate defense, et al. That's why corporations raise the hew and cry often, but do very little but lobby.

The right keeps using the words "Socialist", "Marxist", and "Fascist" to describe Obama. Those words do not mean what they mean think they mean. I mean, really, Obama is a _______ (fill in the blank)? Obviously the right has ZERO idea of how center-right Obama really is. Heck, in any "Socialist" country, Obama would be seen as a right-winger. Fascist? Yeah, right, let me know what the previous President's wonderful record on the Bill of Rights was, in particular the 4th amendment. Marxist? Puh-lease, let me know when Obama pulls a Reagan and sends troops in somewhere over a labor dispute.

Just goes to show you what a lack of perspective nets people.

End all tax "credits" and "exemptions" (including EITC and Mortgage tax credits) and government handouts to corporations. After 5 years of paying off debt, lower the marginal rate. Remember, no exemptions at all. This would sting at first, in fact it would have to be phased in, but then the country would have a tax system that is as "fair" as taxes can be.

How about "cue the Steam users?" Or the Hulu users? Or the PSN/Live users? Or the MSDN users? Or the FOSS users? In case you hadn't noticed, there are a plethora of perfectly legal ways to bust a 40 GB cap in a month. The problem is that a lot of these legal uses compete with the companies' other entertainment options. So they'll cap it so that the legit users can't get their entertainment from the 'tubes, then turn around and tell you that you shouldn't care because all those other guys were filthy pirates anyway.

If they actually gave a damn about your service quality, they'd be upgrading their network.

Truth be told, about 10% of the customers any ISP has will be screwed by this. I'm not going to deny that. Then again that 10% accounts for well over 80% of the network usage. Then again if you can get your heavy users to jump to your competitor, you've screwed them (your competitor) by being able to keep your prices low.

I don't agree with this 100%, but/.'ers are not representative of the average user on the internet. I'm guess this will also be their DOCSIS 3 deployment money. Not that it'll help too much. Just like VDSL, it's all limited at head shed.

2: Once you have the monopoly and the consumer has nowhere else to go, bring in onerous download caps that actually reflect the basic capabilities of your pitiful system.

3: Buy off Washington so that you won't be punished for #1 and #2.

4: PROFIT!

The really Big Lie in all of this is that the argument for caps is that the system only has a very limited capability. Yet WITHOUT CHANGING OUT A SINGLE PIECE OF HARDWARE you can get a much higher cap simply by paying a much higher amount of money. Where did all that extra bandwidth come from? Clearly cable companies lie like rugs, and the public and regulatory agencies continue to buy into those lies as we're all being screwed over!

1) All ISP's do this. Most oversell bandwidth at a more ridiculous rate than they used to oversell modem ports.

2) Actually, they've done pretty good keeping prices low. If it were still only the bells running things we'd be lucky to have DSL.

3) Standard. All companies do this.

4) Not in the network division.

One of my friends works in TW Data. They've done checks and most people (read: over 95%) never break 15gb. Sucks to be high bandwidth users I guess, but if you're part of the minority, you're going to get charged more. As far as bait & switch, if you read your service agreement, they can change prices (et al.) at any time with notice. Now if you have a contract price, that will have to be honored through the end of the contract.

Mind you I'm not defending them 100% because I think the 5gb cap is low. 10gb would be far more reasonable for a mixed family (though I guess grandma and grandpa probably have a hard time breaking 2gb) situation. Gamers (especially consoles) and those downloading videos (incl. P2P) are the ones that are going to be hurt by this. I'd worry but my work pays for me to have a business line. Those are not being affected by this.

Yeah, well now it's blame everyone else because the precious little snowflake can't possibly be wrong. Even being disobedient in class is ok, because school doesn't matter.

F*cking kids today should count their blessings. My teacher could've walloped me right upside the head and my mother probably would've only double-checked if it was a big mark, I couldn't get away with sh*t in school. Should I be caught, I knew I was dead meat. Teaches you quite a lesson about reality to learn that if you f*ck up, you've got to pay the penalty.

Kids today should get a dose of that. You f*ck up, you get kicked out of class. You fail, guess what YOU failed, not the teacher.

On top of that, taking a cut of the sales is a major violation of our property rights.

You have no rights consumer! The copyright holder can, and will, revoke your ability to play at their whim. You don't think you really own the product, do you? Didn't you read the 350 page "license agreement" at all? Why, our team of lawyers worked months to come up with that obtuse document that's unreadable by anyone not in the legal profession, and it's copyrighted too! By the way we're suing you for talking about our game without our permission as permitted under the DMCA part two. You've damaged our ability to make money with our property, not your property, by disclosing the ending to one friend and loaning your disc without permission to another.